4 November – 22 December

TIMOTHY HORN
Villa Medusa

Australian Timothy Horn’s sculpture, informed by queer and feminist theories,
reinterprets historical imagery and objects. Detail and craftsmanship seduce
the viewer. Extensive research evidences itself in layers of references. Playful,
satirical relationships form between his works and their audience.

Horn’s first New York exhibition is comprised of three massive silicone chan-
deliers. They are based upon illustrations of jellyfish by 19th century German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose scientific theories and published images are
questioned by scientists and historians for their accuracy, but remain
influential because of their design and beauty. Haeckel incorporated stylized
creatures into the architecture of his home, Villa Medusa. Horn references the
architectural use of biological forms, traditional Venetian glassmaking, and the
palace at Versailles in his sensuous hanging sculptures.

Horn’s three works, Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale, borrow their names from
the mythological Gorgon sisters, as does the Latin term for jellyfish,
discomedusa. The myth involves themes of beauty, seduction, revenge, and
death. Like jellyfish, which use bioluminescence to attract prey, Horn’s
chandeliers seduce through form, tactility, translucence and horrible beauty.
Ranging from four to ten feet in diameter, their scale goes beyond animal and
human towards otherworldly.

New York Blade review
 
GREG ROSE
Arcadia
‘Landscape’ takes the form of a verb in Los Angeles artist Greg Rose’s new
paintings of manicured nature. Beauty that is created and cultivated —making
something more ideal than it is in reality—is particularly apparent in the
suburban yards and celluloid landscape of greater Los Angeles. Rose’s
paintings express “natural beauty” as a human construct: the aesthetic
idea of nature, rather than nature itself.

The paintings begin with traditional Asian art forms of garden design,
Ikebana, and scholar’s stones. They incorporate images of landscaped
Southern California, where anything grows, perhaps flourishing to the point
of mutation. Influenced by cinema and in particular anime, Rose employs a
hyper-real palette, a flattened perspective, and the artificial, constructed
compositions of set design. As with formal landscaping, the relationship
between chaos and order is refined into a picturesque image that suggests
the idea of nature rather than nature itself.

Representation is reduced to a graphic yet recognizable form. Three-dimen-
sional paint application, in the manner of icing on a petit-four, contrasts
with the surrounding, smoothed picture planes—a reminder of the artifice of
both the ‘garden’ and representation.

 
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click for installation views and details
 
Arcadia, 2006